The human eye drops off reading a paragraph (to the next line) after about one and a half alphabets (39 characters to be exact) - we use this rule to calculate when to split a piece of text into columns.

39 characters is hardly anything!

BurningBeard: Having text spanning right across the page massively impedes readability. You see this on really poorly done websites where you find yourself highlighting the text just to mark what line you are up to.

I dont really see any technical issues on why a site cannot be designed to fill the screen. However, from an information or interaction architecture point of view I think their might be a few reasons.

One reason that springs to mind for a frequent use site would be what I would give the label 'consistency of place' to. What I mean is that it might be a good thing to have the same information in the same place every time the user visits the site. If the browser is moving the contents around due to scaling, then I would suggest that it would become harder for the user to first visually locate that information and also to interact with it (say using the mouse).

Ramboss: This has probably been talked about, but i wanted to have a moan. With the exception of a few websites (including this one) Most websites are not in widescreen format, eg Trademe, Stuff, and IGN. and that is to name but a few. Most if not All laptops, pc monitors and even tv's that surf the web are 16:9 or a similar widescreen format. So WHY are all these websites still in a 4:3 format. It is terrible to look at when using a 1080p laptop monitor, and half of the screen is either blank or advertising.

When will these popular sites get with the times and offer 16:9 support like geekzone does?

And thank god for that!Myself and most of the people I know dont have wide screen.Most if not all of the PC monitors in my circles are standard 4:3 not 16:9!!!

Ramboss: This has probably been talked about, but i wanted to have a moan. With the exception of a few websites (including this one) Most websites are not in widescreen format, eg Trademe, Stuff, and IGN. and that is to name but a few. Most if not All laptops, pc monitors and even tv's that surf the web are 16:9 or a similar widescreen format. So WHY are all these websites still in a 4:3 format. It is terrible to look at when using a 1080p laptop monitor, and half of the screen is either blank or advertising.

When will these popular sites get with the times and offer 16:9 support like geekzone does?

And thank god for that!Myself and most of the people I know dont have wide screen.Most if not all of the PC monitors in my circles are standard 4:3 not 16:9!!!

Well you must not have anyone in your circles who are using a laptop that has been brought in the last year or so, because they are all going the way of the widescreen

TwoSeven: I dont really see any technical issues on why a site cannot be designed to fill the screen.

Fixed Width vs Fluid vs Responsive

Fixed width is by far the least complex, the fastest to create and the hardest to get wrong.

Given the amount of time developers spend resolving various different browser quirks even with a simple fixed width layout usually most budgets (time/money) dont allow for the time needed for a nice fluid or responsive layout unless you do the old school way with tables which are just nasty because they mix mark-up and styling.

There are a few pre done html/css boilerplate/grid type projects which have improved a lot, to the point where it's probably cost efficient to use one of them.

Ramboss: This has probably been talked about, but i wanted to have a moan. With the exception of a few websites (including this one) Most websites are not in widescreen format, eg Trademe, Stuff, and IGN. and that is to name but a few. Most if not All laptops, pc monitors and even tv's that surf the web are 16:9 or a similar widescreen format. So WHY are all these websites still in a 4:3 format. It is terrible to look at when using a 1080p laptop monitor, and half of the screen is either blank or advertising.

When will these popular sites get with the times and offer 16:9 support like geekzone does?

And thank god for that!Myself and most of the people I know dont have wide screen.Most if not all of the PC monitors in my circles are standard 4:3 not 16:9!!!

Well you must not have anyone in your circles who are using a laptop that has been brought in the last year or so, because they are all going the way of the widescreen

Correct. Most of the people I know cant afford a laptop let alone a modern one. They use PC's with standard CRT monitors.I did have a wide screen laptop but it died and I haven't bothered to replace it yet.

TwoSeven: I dont really see any technical issues on why a site cannot be designed to fill the screen.

Fixed Width vs Fluid vs Responsive

Fixed width is by far the least complex, the fastest to create and the hardest to get wrong.

The geekzone website is fluid, but I always view it in a smaller window, as the length of the lines just gets too long to read comfortably on a widescreen monitor. Personally I prefer websites that are a fixed width.

Now add some other tablets and mobile devices into the mix and I don't see the need to support 1024x768 ending any time soon.

The widescreen format is nice for movies, but I don't really like it that much for doing any real work. I'm currently using the work laptop with 1366x768 and I'm always finding that I want more vertical height so I can have more lines of my document visible. Wide becomes more useful when the monitor is wide enough so that I can have a document and a terminal window and/or text editor fully visible at the same time, but in many cases I'd prefer a larger 4:3 format screen.